A CERTAIN ORNERINESS
There are
two possible approaches to the subject of analyzing the populist
and progressive
movements in the United States, and I am going to describe
the road not taken, right off the bat, so as to underscore
my thesis: that there really is (or was) no such thing as
a populist or progressive movement, or even a coherent ideology
that either term might describe, but only a tendency, in effect¸
a spirit that seems, somehow, inextricably linked to the American
Midwest, and, I would claim, practically everything West of
the Mississippi. The populist or progressive spirit, in this
sense, is a certain orneriness, a contrarian spirit that revels
in its independence and willingness to stand up for high principle.
PERSONALITIES
AND PANACEAS
This is
a personality trait, not an ideological principle,
so you can see the virtual impossibility of describing the
progressive "movement" that arose at the tail end of the 19th
century in anything but the broadest brush strokes. While
certain themes abound – distrust of big business, hostility
to banks, a belief in such populist panaceas as public power
and "free silver," a Jeffersonian concept of local control
and a regionalism that offended the super-centralism of Eastern
liberals and socialist technocrats – the populist and progressive
tendencies in American politics were in no sense a unified
movement, or a party, even though several different parties
arose to claim these mantles. None of these parties, however,
achieved any kind of real national presence: such success
as they did achieve was on a strictly local level, such as
the Farmer-Labor
movement in the Northwest, and the Non-Partisan League
in the American Midwest.
EXEMPLAR
The broad-brushstrokes
approach is more appropriate to a book, or to some university
professor who has had years to perfect the condensation of
my theme: that progressivism was a transitional movement,
the seedbed that nurtured the Old Right and the conservative
movement of today. But for my own purposes here – and as
a perfect illustration of the idea that populism is a personality
trait rather than an ideology – it is better to focus on
one individual as an exemplar of this spirit. I have chosen
Burton
K. Wheeler, a Montana Democrat, who served in the US Senate
from 1923 to 1946, for a number of reasons that ought to become
apparent as we delve into his career. But, first of all, it
is the personality that comes through, all these years later,
in the pages of his excellent and very entertaining autobiography,
Yankee
from the West, that epitomizes the old progressive
spirit.
YANKEE FROM
THE WEST
He was,
indeed, a Yankee from the West, born and bred in Hudson, Massachusetts,
his paternal grandfather among the settlers who founded the
Massachusetts town of Concord, and Wheeler recalls his Eastern
youth it as if it were "etched in a whole gallery of Currier
& Ives prints." His maternal grandfather, Abe Tyler, was
a farmer and New England autodidact of a certain familiar
type, whose orations at town hall meetings thrilled the young
Wheeler and inspired in him a sympathy for unorthodox ideas.
The beginning of Wheeler's political evolution is recorded,
by him, as an early infatuation with the radical economic
gospel of William
Jennings Bryan, and a natural affinity for the low tariff-free
trade views of Western farmers. This last, Wheeler confides,
"disgusted" his brothers. "They pointed out how Massachusetts
industry would suffer under free trade," but Wheeler, it seems,
had developed a Midwestern frame of mind even before he went
West.
TRAVELING SALESMAN
Working
his way through the University of Michigan Law School, he
took a job as a traveling book salesman, roving throughout
the Midwest hawking Dr.
Chase's Receipt Book, which supplied the farming family
with advice on how to deal with the everyday hazards of farming
life, including "Suffocation from Hanging." In his travels
he met the woman who was to become his wife, Lulu Wheeler,
and, having graduated from law school, he was faced with the
question that every youth faces at such a propitious time:
what now? For Wheeler, the thought of going back East seemed
stultifying. He had heard stories of the "wild West" and wanted
to find out for himself. He took off on his own, looking for
work in lawyers' offices from Los Angles to Portland, Tuscon,
and Salt Lake City.
A QUIRK OF
FATE
On October
15, 1905, he stepped off a train at the Northern Pacific depot
in Butte, Montana, thinking that he had seen more of the West
than Lewis and Clarke, but wondering if perhaps his luck had
run out. After looking up every lawyer in town, and with only
one offer – that he decided to turn down – he decided to
go up to Spokane, Washington, on the grounds that he had never
been there. He checked out of his rooming house, and started
toward the train station, when he passed a saloon. Standing
outside were two genial men, dressed like respectable citizens
and, as Wheeler described them, "oozing with geniality." Before
he knew it, he was inside the saloon, and deep into a poker
game. A friendly game of cards turned out to be a complete
loss for young Wheeler: inside of a few hours, not only was
the train long gone but so were his savings. Now, he had no
choice but to stay in Butte – a quirk of Fate that would
have a major impact not only on the course of his own career,
but on the developing politics of the state of Montana.
BOOM TOWN
Butte was
a boom town, smack dab in the middle of bare-assed mountains,
the countryside denuded for fifty miles around; it was a jumble
of soot-stained buildings, crisscrossed wires, and mountains
of slag. The fire of the smelter lit up the sky, day and night,
and the air was sulfuric: it was like the lowest pit of Hell,
thought Lulu Wheeler, when she first set eyes on it, and she
promptly burst into tears – but later came to love it. It
was a land of extremes: not only an extreme physical environment,
but also extremes of wealth and poverty. The Company, as they
called the Anaconda Copper Company, dominated not only the
town but the state: a gigantic smokestack, said to be the
largest on earth, dominated the skyline, belching smoke and
hellfire. In its shadow the workers rose each morning and
descended into the mines, more than two thousand miles tunneling
the Butte mountains. An average of one miner a day was killed
or seriously injured: and the survivors were prone to "miner's
con," a disease of the lung that struck down many more in
the long term.
THE COPPER
KINGS
As a diversion,
they sought out any and every sort of entertainment when the
day's work was done: Butte was the scene of more bars than
the Barbary Coast, with such colorful establishments as The
Alley Cat, Bucket of Blood, the Cesspool, the Graveyard, and
Pay Day beckoning the thirsty miner is search of a good time.
It was a man's town, full of Cornish and Welsh miners, and
later the Irish; it was also full of confidence men, prostitutes,
and adventurers who sought their fortunes in the state's great
mineral wealth, battling not only Mother Nature to plunder
her hidden treasures, but also fighting each other, and the
politics of the state revolved around the feuds of the copper
kings. They used the state and local governments, just as
their employees used crowbars and dynamite, as weapons in
the struggle over disputed mines.
ANACONDA'S
COILS
By 1905,
when Burt Wheeler was first elected to the state legislature,
these battles had been largely resolved in favor of "The
Company" – and, in Montana in those days, there was no
need to ask "which company?" The Anaconda Copper Company not
only owned most of the state of Montana, but it owned both
major political parties, the state legislature, the governor,
and local officials down to the county level. The Company
was used to getting its way, and wasn't shy about paying off
its friends and potential enemies: but they soon discovered,
to their great consternation, that Wheeler couldn't be bribed.
Wheeler became a champion of the common folk of Montana, the
miners who took their lives in their hands every day when
they went down into those great pits, the domain of the underworld,
and were lucky to come out unscathed. He managed to pass a
fair amount of legislation protecting workers' rights, giving
workers the benefit of a doubt in personal injury cases –
but not without furious opposition from The Company.
RED LIGHT 'SOCIALISM'
Wheeler's
political star rose on a wave of left-populist sentiment symbolized
by the electoral sweep that the Socialist Party made in Butte's
1911 city elections, where they elected their candidate for
mayor along with a majority on the city council. The new mayor
was inaugurated on a platform that he would close all dance
halls in the red light district, ban the sale of alcohol in
"any place where there is traffic between the sexes," and
regulate the prostitution business so that the girls would
get regular checkups. The $10 license collected by the city
from practitioners of the world's oldest profession was promptly
abolished, as it was considered a source of graft on the part
of the police.
THE KAISER
IN BUTTE
This was
hardly the socialism of Marx and Lenin. Instead, it was more
like the moralism of Carrie
Nation mixed with the suffragette radicalism of Jeanette
Rankin. Rankin, a Montana Republican, was the first woman
ever elected to Congress, and also a staunch opponent of World
War I, one of 49 members of Congress to vote against entering
the European maelstrom. The war had some pretty fearsome consequences
in Montana: you wouldn't think that landlocked Montana would
worry much about a possible German invasion, but stories of
German spies in the state were common, and there was a great
to-do about a possible attack from German aircraft. There
were all kinds of sightings of the airborne Hun, who were
said to be dropping to earth in balloons, and if the newspapers
of the time are to be believed the hills of Montana were crawling
with the Kaiser's legions. The immigrant miners were caught
up in this hysteria, much of it based on ethnicity, and the
Germans and Irish came under particular scrutiny, on account
of their alleged pro-German sympathies. Union leaders were
accused of sabotaging the war effort. The Montana Council
of Defense, a group appointed by the Company-owned governor,
assumed almost total power in the state – in the name of
winning the war, of course.
DEFENDER OF
FREE SPEECH
Wheeler
had by this time been sidelined by The Company in state politics,
and, with the help of the liberal faction of the Democratic
party, managed to get himself appointed state district attorney
on the resignation of the incumbent. Wheeler, who had defended
union organizers from the depredations of The Company, now
felt called on to defend the Non Partisan League organizer
who was beaten and driven out of town by a pro-war mob: he
searched (in vain) for the murderers who dragged Frank
Little, an IWW organizer who spoke out against the war,
from his bed and hanged him from a railroad trestle in Butte.
More than 2500 mourners turned his funeral procession into
an antiwar protest. When the editor of the Butte Bulletin,
Bill Dunn, thundered that "every man, woman and child knows
that Company agents perpetrated this foulest of all crimes,"
he was accused to sedition. But Wheeler refused to prosecute
him, just as he refused to prosecute all the other dissidents
whose only crime was to take the US Constitution seriously.
NO END OF TROUBLE
The governor
and his Council of Defense demanded that Wheeler crack down:
Montana, they whined, had become a hotbed of sedition and
high treason, and it was all his fault. Wheeler replied that
free speech was no crime. This, and the antiwar views of his
wife, Lulu, caused him no end of trouble. When Lulu Wheeler
was approached and asked to take the wheatless, sugarless
pledge – a conservation measure designed to help the war
effort – she steadfastly refused, citing her friend Jeanette
Rankin's opinion that one ought not to deny her children wheat
or sugar as long as it was still being used to make whiskey.
This outraged the town gossips and local super-patriots, who
soon spread the canard that the Wheelers were pro-German.
DOWN BUT NOT
OUT
The Council
of Defense went on the warpath, and the newspapers joined
in, demanding his resignation. Wheeler's life was threatened.
His friends crossed the street to avoid him. While his wife
stood by his side, and his good friend, Senator Thomas Walsh,
offered to reappoint him despite the tremendous political
pressure to dump him, Wheeler resigned, and returned to the
practice of law. The Company, it seemed, had beaten him –
but, as it turned out, their victory was only temporary. Wheeler
was soon up and running for office, this time for governor:
he was determined to break Anaconda's death-grip on Montana
politics.
'BOLSHEVIK
BURT'
Montana's
Company-controlled press went ballistic. They called him "Bolshevik
Burt," and accused of everything from treason to advocating
"the nationalization
of women" (whatever that was supposed to mean!). Posters
appeared all over the state showing a hand dripping with blood,
captioned: "Don't let this happen to Montana!" Prominent Democrats,
such as Senator
Henry Myers, urged a yes vote for the national Democratic
ticket, but urged his fellows to resist the takeover of the
state party by Wheeler and his band of nonpartisan reformers.
DÉNOUEMENT
IN DILLON
In Dillon,
south of Butte, Wheeler was refused the use of a hall to give
a campaign speech. When he used a ranch outside of town as
an alternative site, the meeting was visited by a band of
vigilantes who grabbed him and made every attempt to drag
him away, saying they were going to lynch him on the spot.
He managed to escape, however, taking refuge in an old boxcar
that was in use as a railroad depot. Wheeler was rescued by
a ranch-hand, who declared that he was ready to die for free
speech: he and Wheeler spent the night in the boxcar, until
the sheriff could arrive and escort Wheeler to safer terrain.
After that, they called him "Boxcar Burt" – and that wasn't
the last time in the course of the campaign that his life
was in danger.
THE COMPANY
RULES
For all
the red-baiting hysteria, however, Wheeler and his supporters
in the Nonpartisan League were little more than good government
reformers. Wheeler's slogan, during his race for governor,
was "If elected, I will not put Anaconda out of business,
but I will put it out of politics." The slogan of the NPL
candidates was: "We are opposed to private ownership of public
officials" – hardly a revolutionary call to overthrow the
capitalist state. The Company, on the other hand, had used
the alleged threat of sedition and "anarchy" to impose martial
law on the state and crush all opposition: Anaconda's idea
of "laissez-faire"
capitalism was that The Company should be left alone to control
not only the economy but the state government.
SENATOR WHEELER
Wheeler's
defeat in this election meant that they would retain control
for just a little while longer: Boxcar Burt was down, but
not out. His friends and supporters in the Nonpartisan League
urged him to run for the US Senate in the 1922 elections,
and, after a hard-fought campaign, he was elected by a large
margin, and immediately joined the progressive caucus of the
next Congress. When he arrived in Washington, he addressed
the national Council of Progressives, some 800 delegates,
and spoke not only about the concerns of farmers – freight
rates were too high, boxcars too dear – but also hailed the
call of the conference to release the free speech prisoners
who were still imprisoned as a result of the recent war hysteria.
In doing so, he pointed out that he was acting as "a true
conservative" would, explaining that we needed to return to
the original letter and spirit of the Constitution – "from
which we have wandered in recent times."
TEAPOT DOME
Right off
the bat, Wheeler's career in the Senate was marked by a brashness
that was in marked contrast to the complacent collegiality
of that august body. His first major speech was a rip-roaring
attack on the Attorney
General, Harry M. Daugherty, for protecting the profiteers
of the infamous Teapot
Dome scandal. Here was an outfit with the rather unattractive
moniker of the "Mammoth Oil Company" bribing the secretary
of the interior, Albert
B. Fall, who had been a Republican Senator representing
New Mexico, to turn over public lands for private profit.
Great tracts of Midwestern and California land had been bought
up by the federal government in the name of "conservation"
– but these were leased out secretly by the Department of
the Interior to those "entrepreneurs" who were generous with
their "loans." Secretary Fall raked in the cash, as did several
others in the Harding administration, and the progressives,
when the scandal was exposed, were up in arms, with Walsh,
Wheeler, LaFollette,
and a phalanx of Midwestern progressives taking the lead.
IN THE SPIRIT
OF NIXON
The investigations
of the Teapot Dome scandal led to a vicious reprisal from
the Attorney General's office, which indicted Wheeler on the
trumped-up charge of unlawfully using his influence to obtain
oil and gas leases for one of his supporters. Long before
Richard Nixon drew up lists
of his enemies and sicced the FBI on them, Wheeler was targeted
by those same federal agents, who had been assigned by their
Republican paymasters to travel to Montana and dig up dirt
on those two troublemakers, Wheeler and Walsh.
UP AGAINST
THE TWO PARTIES
The progressives
won a moral and a political victory in the wake of the Teapot
Dome scandal, in which the power of certain private interests
were exposed. They also shook up the political landscape to
such an extent that they threatened the two-party system.
While the Republicans renominated Coolidge,
the Democrats ignored Wheeler's forewarning of a progressive
revolt and put up Morgan lawyer John
W. Davis. Wheeler repudiated the national Democrats, and
the progressives walked out of the party, and put up their
own ticket, with Robert M. La Follette as the candidate of
the newly-formed Independent Progressive Party. Wheeler was
drafted to run for Vice President, but initially he refused
the new party's entreaties. He didn't think he had the national
stature, and had never ventured into such alien lands as New
York, Boston, or Chicago, where the audiences were a far cry
from the folks back home in Montana.
A CHANGE OF
HEART
It was at
this point that Wheeler received word that a second indictment
against him was imminent, and that the Justice Department
lawyers were readying the charges – but wouldn't release
them if he decided against accepting La Follette's offer.
The progressive movement, although strong in the Democratic
party, was even more militant and pervasive in the Republican
party, especially out West, and the Republicans were convinced
that a La Follette-Wheeler ticket would hurt them more than
it would the Democrats. Wheeler was so enraged by this threat
that, immediately upon receiving it, he told La Follette that
he had changed his mind: he would run after all.
PROGRESSIVE
NAÏVETÉ
During that
campaign, both Wheeler and La Follette offered up an array
of nostrums – public power, government control of vast tracts
of wilderness land – as a cure for the all-pervasive corruption
of national politics. The government, it seemed, was for sale
to the highest bidder, and the leitmotif of the progressives
in congress and on the national scene was that they were shocked
– shocked! – that such unseemly behavior was even
possible. It never occurred to them that the instruments designed
to "protect" the consumers from monopolism, and the public
weal from theft, had been created and designed by the very
same interests they were supposed to regulate. There was something
supremely naïve about this strain of American progressivism
as exemplified by Wheeler and La Follette, at least at this
stage in its development; but Wheeler proved far less of a
Midwestern naïf when it came to foreign affairs.
AMERICA FOR
THE AMERICANS
At an election
event in San Francisco, a man rose to announce that, as a
captain in the British army, he was very much interested to
hear Wheeler's opinion of La Follette's antiwar stance. After
La Follette voted against our entry into World War I on the
grounds that it served only the Morgan interests and the international
bankers, the Wisconsin state legislature had passed a resolution
practically accusing their own Senator of being little more
than an agent of the
Kaiser. Wheeler prefaced his reply by averring that "we
have had too much British interest in our national affairs,"
and declared that he had no apology to make for La Follette's
antiwar stance. The American people, in electing Wilson, had
done so on account of his lying boast: "He kept us out of
war." Besides, said Wheeler, he wasn't campaigning for the
votes of English, Japanese, or any other foreign nationals,
"but just Americans who believed in America." Wheeler reports
in his memoir that "this answer met with such wild cheering
that I used the story again at an evening meeting and any
other place I could figure out a way to drag it in."
A RESPECTABLE
SHOWING
When all
the votes were in, La-Follette/Wheeler had polled a little
under five million votes, carrying Wisconsin, but running
ahead of Davis in 12 states, all of them out West. In California,
they garnered 33 percent to Davis's 8 percent, and in Montana
the Independent Progressives achieved 39 percent of the vote,
with Coolidge's 42.5 percent barely edging them out.
TRIBUNE OF
THE PEOPLE
Wheeler
returned to the Democratic party, but he always emphasized
the meaninglessness of party labels – or, indeed, political-ideological
labels of any kind – and took up the cudgels on behalf of
a number of "liberal" causes, such as the repeal
of Prohibition, and especially the fight against the Smoot-Hawley
tariff. In this fight Wheeler was the tribune of his agrarian
constituents, who had to sell in a free market and buy in
a protected market. Wheeler and his fellow "sons of the wild
jackass" – as Senator George H. Moses, Republican of New
Hampshire characterized the progressive free traders of both
parties – saw themselves as the defenders of ordinary folk
against the aristocrats of corporate privilege. Just as Wheeler
had stood up to The Company in its demands for special privileges
and subsidies from the state government back home in Montana,
so he opposed the machinations of the Eastern manufacturers
and the various investment banking institutions to enrich
themselves at the expense of consumers.
PRUDERY AND
PROTECTIONISM
Embedded
in the tariff question were all kinds of other issues: regional,
economic, and even moral. Senator
Smoot was determined to keep in his tariff bill provisions
that kept supposedly obscene written materials out of the
country on the grounds that they might fatally subvert the
nation's morals. Wheeler and progressives of both parties
moved to strike the morals provision, whereupon Smoot proposed
to read to the Senate the juiciest passages from D.
H. Lawrence's latest novel, Lady
Chatterley's Lover. Naturally, the Senators would
have to meet in secret session, in order to preserve the moral
tone of the nation. The Senate majority, more confident than
Smoot that the country would survive the assault on its morals,
rejected the idea of secrecy, and invited the Senator to go
ahead with his proposed public reading. Smoot showed up on
the Senate floor with an armful of naughty volumes. "The reading
of these books," he intoned, "would so disgust senators that
they would never dream of agreeing to the amendment" that
would abolish the morals provision of the tariff law. "You
need only read a page or two to know how damnable they are."
One after the other, the members of the Senate went up to
Smoot's desk to receive the forbidden volumes: the worst (or
is that best?) passages had been helpfully bookmarked by the
Senator and his aides. The galleries tittered as it became
apparent that they were reading more than a page or two. Wheeler
and his progressive allies mocked Smoot for having made Lady
Chatterly's Lover into a classic, but all their sarcasm,
no matter how withering, failed to carry the day. As Wheeler
sardonically notes in his memoir, "It was nearly thirty years
before the customs bureau felt the American public was mature
enough to have Lady Chatterley's Lover imported."
WHEELER &
FDR
Wheeler
was one of the first Democrats to come out for Franklin Delano
Roosevelt's presidential bid – in April of 1930, in a speech
at the Democratic party's Jefferson Day dinner – and was
also one of the first to turn against him. While Roosevelt
made all the right liberal-progressive noises, and talked
about and seemed to genuinely empathize with the plight of
the ordinary American in his famous fireside chats, his sort
of progressivism was neither populist nor was it truly American,
at least not in the sense that Wheeler and his fellow sons
of the wild jackass understood it. It took a while for the
progressives of both parties to wake up to the danger posed
by FDR, but when they did they were galvanized, and none more
so than Burton K. Wheeler.
WHEELER REBELS
The debate
over the National Recovery Act was the first real division
between the formerly solid pro-New Deal progressives and the
President. Whereas the old progressive goal of legislation
had been to foster competition within a capitalist framework,
to protect the medium-to-small businessmen and the farmers
from monopolist predators, the apparent aim of the NRA was
to create giant cartels and stifle competition. Wheeler denounced
the act as unworkable and undemocratic – and saw in it the
first inklings of a dangerous trend in the Administration,
a lust for centralized power.
A FITTING SYMBOL
Much was
made by FDR of the apparent antipathy Mrs. Wheeler had for
him personally: he called her the "Lady
MacBeth" behind the Senator, who influenced him to oppose
the administration. There is some truth to this, but the antipathy
was not so much personal as it was ideological. The Wheelers'
daughter, Elizabeth
Wheeler Colman, tells the story of how, upon passage of
the Agricultural Adjustment Act, secretary of agriculture
and noted fellow traveler Henry
A. Wallace presented them with two apple trees that he
had hybridized. Wheeler-Colman writes;
"They grew
beautifully, but bore no fruit. Mother thought that they symbolized
the philosophy behind AAA."
COUNTDOWN TO
CATASTROPHE
Here, after
all, was a government agency that was authorized to pay hundreds
of millions of dollars to farmers to slaughter animals, throw
out milk, and refrain from planting crops. Wheeler,
always on the lookout for corporate welfare schemes, couldn't
help but notice that one sugar company alone received over
a million dollars to keep its sugar off the market. Opposition
to government largesse was hardly a new position for Wheeler:
he had opposed Hoover's prelude to the New Deal, the Reconstruction
Finance Corporation, which had the power to extend all sorts
of government-backed credits to the railroads, banks, and
insurance companies. Not all progressives saw it that way,
however: young Bob La Follette had been scared into supporting
the RFC because, as he confided to Wheeler, he was deathly
afraid of a crash. "Yes," said Wheeler, "and the sooner
it's over the better. This will only prolong the depression."
But the economy was not allowed to shake out the massive malinvestment
that had been caused by bank credit expansion: instead, the
house of cards was built higher and higher until the collapse,
when it finally came, was catastrophic.
PACKING THE
COURT
These were
intimations of the progressive revolt against the New Deal,
but in the main, at least in the beginning, the Western bloc
supported FDR as long as they thought he was just trying to
get the country back on track. There was one "emergency" measure,
however, that they couldn't and wouldn't support, one the
implications of which were ominous to those who still believed
in constitutional government, and that was the court-packing
scheme. When the NRA and the AAA were declared unconstitutional
by the Supreme Court, the President retaliated in the only
way he knew how – by purging them. His purpose was not even
half concealed beneath the pretense of proposing a sweeping
"reorganization" of the federal judiciary, which, among other
things, involved granting himself the power to appoint a new
Supreme Court justice for every member of the court who refused
to retire after the age of seventy. With six at that age or
over, and with no sign of a single one of them retiring, Roosevelt
would get to pack the court with at least six more justices.
It was a prescription for a presidential dictatorship, and
Wheeler was absolutely appalled. While the President tried
mightily to win him over, Wheeler was determined to oppose
him: indeed, Wheeler led the opposition, and this was really
the beginning of his political transformation.
TURNING AGAINST
FDR
For up until
the court-packing scheme was introduced in Congress, Wheeler
and his fellow progressives had been reliable allies of the
President. Just as long as the New Deal was seen as an emergency
measure to deal with an unnatural catastrophe, a jobs-making
program to alleviate the suffering of ordinary folk, a kind
of insurance against the economic royalists taking advantage
of the crisis to extend and cement their control of industry,
the progressives were for it. But as soon as it became apparent
that FDR and his Brain Trust were out for pure power, and
that they reveled in and even extended the economic downturn
precisely because it empowered them, men like Wheeler began
to turn against the administration.
UP AGAINST
THE DEMAGOGUE
Court historians
endlessly quote the famous words of the President's plea to
pass the court-packing scheme: "Here is one third of a nation
ill nourished, ill clad, ill housed – now!" he thundered,
in that voice rich with resonance, "if we keep faith with
those who had faith in us, if we would make democracy succeed
I say we must act – now!" It was, thought Wheeler, "the most
demagogic speech [he] had ever heard," as he puts it in his
memoir, and what was frightening was that it was coming from
the President of the United States instead of some strutting
European would-be Caesar.
NO DEAL WITH
THE NEW DEAL
Wheeler's
opposition and that of the other congressional progressives
was a fatal blow to the President's ambition: for here he
was inveighing against the "nine old men" as the virtual embodiments
of economic royalism, and the avowed enemies of plutocracy
were siding with – the conservatives! Roosevelt sent his
emissary, Tommy
Corcoran, to negotiate a deal, but Wheeler would have
no truck with it. The President, said Corcoran, "doesn't care
about those Tories being against it, but he doesn't want you
to be against it."
A DIFFERENT
SPECIES
The canny
FDR knew that he couldn't win without progressive support.
While he could always attack the conservatives as lackeys
of Wall Street, and characterize their opposition to his dictatorship
as the self-interested defensiveness of the Haves against
the Have-nots, such a tactic wouldn't work when it came to
Wheeler. The President thought he could lull Wheeler into
his camp, or at least neutralize him, by promising the Montana
Senator a strong voice in picking the six new Supreme Court
justices. But even if Wheeler believed this might happen,
he wasn't buying it. What the President failed to understand
was that progressivism in the Western sense was not just another
form of ideological leftism, but a different species altogether
from its Eastern cousins. They had stood up against The Company's
monopolization of economic and political power: would the
progressives sit still while their fellow "liberals"
overthrew the Constitution and effected a similar coup? In
his reply to the President's "ill-nourished, ill-clad, ill-housed"
demagoguery, Wheeler clearly stated the libertarian roots
of the progressive credo:
"Create now a political Court to echo the ideas of
the executive, and you have created a weapon; a weapon which
in the hands of another President could well be the instrument
of destruction; a weapon that can cut down those guarantees
of liberty written into your great doctrine by the blood of
your forefathers and that can extinguish your right of liberty
of speech, or thought, or action, or of religion; a weapon
whose use is only dictated by the conscience of the wielder."
THE CONSCIENCE
OF A PRESIDENT
That the
President's conscience was not a contingency he could count
on was the clear implication of this statement, and as the
court-packing fight unfolded this became ever more apparent.
Roosevelt and his supporters used every weapon at their disposal
– including a tremendous propaganda campaign, with every
sort of pressure brought to bear on Senators to get them to
vote in favor. Even some of Wheeler's own appointees wrote
him letters, protesting his opposition to the President's
plan. This had the opposite of its intended effect on Wheeler,
whose personality was naturally averse to this insult to his
incorruptibility, and he redoubled his efforts – to striking
effect.
A LASTING ACHIEVEMENT
For it was
Wheeler who really crippled the President's propaganda blitz,
and stopped the up-'til-then undefeated FDR dead in his tracks.
He went to Justice
Louis Brandeis, who recommended that he go see Chief
Justice Charles Evans Hughes if he wanted any help in
the matter – such as a public statement. Wheeler balked:
he had opposed the appointment of Hughes, but Brandeis himself
went to the phone, called up the chief justice, and handed
the phone to Wheeler. Soon Wheeler had a statement from the
chief justice of the Supreme Court, which he dropped like
a bombshell in the congressional hearings on the bill. The
sound of the explosion could be heard all over Washington,
as the opposition to the court-packing galvanized and carried
the day – and the vote. When the Judiciary Committee reported
unfavorably on the bill, this sentence stood out: "This is
a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its
parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives
of the free people of America." This may be one of Wheeler's
lasting achievements: that no one has dared raised such a
bill or anything like it ever since.
WAR CLOUDS
The completion
of the progressives' break with FDR and the New Deal came
over the issue of intervention in Europe, and, for Wheeler,
this was really the defining moment of his political career,
the key to his transformation from someone who considered
himself a liberal or a man of the Left into an exemplar of
the Old Right. Opposition to imperialism was always a major
plank in the progressive platform, but during the economic
emergency of the Great Depression and the first hundred days
of the Roosevelt administration, the issue of war and peace
abroad had taken a back seat to the issue of impending class
war on the home front. As war clouds gathered on the European
horizon, however, and the New Dealers ran out of peacetime
ways to spend themselves out of the Depression, Roosevelt
increasingly looked abroad for the solution to his domestic
political problems.
ANSWERING ELEANOR
Wheeler
recalls a conversation between FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt in
which the latter is sitting there asking: "Franklin, when
are you going to do something about unemployment?" The President
ignores her, and instead turns his attention to Wheeler. She
repeats the question, and still no answer. Finally, after
a third inquiry, FDR turned to her and said: "My dear, if
I knew I would have told you a long time ago. I'm going to
try a little of this and a little of that and see what we
come out with." Wheeler, in his memoir, notes that in 1937
he related this story to a White House aide, and was surprised
by his comment: "Did it ever occur to you that there is no
unemployment in wartime?"
FROM WILSON
TO HITLER
The populist-progressive
understanding of war as a business undertaking, one which
profited banks, arms manufacturers, and undertakers, was an
analysis that was sharpened and honed in the years leading
up to our entry into World War II. The militant anti-interventionism
of the William
Jennings Bryan, Randolph
Bourne, Tom
Watson, and others was really born in the disillusionment
that swept the country in the wake of the signing of the Versailles
Treaty and the rejection of the League of Nations. The great
war to end all war, famously touted as a struggle to "make
the world safe for democracy," had apparently been fought
to make the world safe for the spread of European imperialism
throughout Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The Wilsonian
dream of peace and universal democracy gave way, in very short
order, to the nightmare of Europe in the thrall of totalitarianism.
AGAINST 'DOLLAR
DIPLOMACY'
Wheeler
had opposed the policy of intervention, in 1926, when Coolidge
sent the Marines into Nicaragua. The "dollar diplomacy" of
those years was a ready target for the progressives, who merely
saw it as the machinations of The Company transferred to an
international setting. Wheeler saw that the leathernecks landed
in order to prop up a US-backed government "and thus retain
control for some New York bankers of that little country's
national bank and railroad." He introduced a resolution calling
for the withdrawal of US troops: it failed but his opposition
had some influence in getting the administration to come up
with an exit strategy. In 1927, he had opposed those who wanted
to go to war with Mexico, when a leftist government expropriated
American property and took out after the Catholic Church.
American Catholics were instantly converted into the vanguard
of the War Party, and pressure was brought to bear on Wheeler
by some of his constituents. Wheeler, however, took the view
that, as he put it, "If we went to war because some country
was persecuting a religious group . . . we would be at war
with every country in the world sooner or later."
BOOMERANG
He also
spoke out against the British attempt to lure us into protecting
Western economic interests in Shanghai, and argued that "England's
strong-arm policy in the Orient has failed, and if the US
follows the advice of some of our pro-British citizens in
the Orient, she will also fail." We could either get out of
the way, and let a moderate democratic regime take root in
China, or else face the prospect that the country would go
Bolshevik. In this he was prescient, as he was on the question
of the European war. There, too, the unintended consequences
of our actions would produce a boomerang effect, and we would
later have cause to regret it. If we had allowed Hitler and
Stalin to fight it out, then "one would end in his grave,
the other in the hospital, and the United States and the world
would have been rid of two menacing tyrants."
A PROPHECY
This was
the crux of the Old Right's foreign policy stance in the prewar
years, and it was the natural extension of the old progressive
critique of dollar diplomacy, with the added feature of a
growing anti-communism. When Wheeler first went to the Senate
he took a trip to Russia, and returned thinking that perhaps,
at some point, the regime would soften up, and begin to moderate
its repressive features. He thought that recognizing the regime
might help accomplish this. But he came to realize that Communism
was something different altogether, and by the time Hitler
had invaded the Soviet Union and American leftists were demanding
US intervention to save the "worker's fatherland,"
Wheeler was completely disabused of this notion that the Soviets
could be tamed or even tempered. In 1940, as we teetered on
the brink of intervening, Wheeler saw much further than many:
"The United States," he said, "will undoubtedly enter the
war with Germany and win. But mark my word, within ten years
we will be asking Germany to assist the West in controlling
Russia."
WHEELER PRESSES
ON
It was,
of course, the Old Right's worst nightmare: in building up
the Soviet Union, we were laying the foundations of a cold
war that would extend into the 1990s. After the attack on
Pearl Harbor, Wheeler did not give up the fight but kept on
the Administration's case, and even lobbied for a negotiated
peace. Why, he wanted to know, wasn't the United States making
a deal with the anti-Hitler opposition in the German military?
These heroic fighters against Nazism on the home front were
haughtily dismissed by FDR and the pro-Soviet Harry
Hopkins as "Prussian junkers,"
who had to be swept away along with Hitler. Yet they could
have saved millions from dying after the Allied invasion of
Europe, by overthrowing Hitler before the Normandy landing
and negotiating an end to the war. FDR, however, would not
deal with the German underground, and insisted on Germany's
unconditional surrender, even against Stalin's advice.
TARGET OF THE
WAR PARTY
In the postwar
period, Wheeler was targeted by the left-wing of the Democratic
Party, the labor unions, the Communists, and the big Eastern
interests: together they succeeded in unseating him, in 1946,
after a smear campaign that even made the one they pulled
on Lindbergh look mild in comparison. The Communists went
through all the trouble of having an entire book published
and widely distributed throughout the state, The Plot Against
America: Senator Wheeler and the Forces Behind Him, by
David George Kin, which reads as if the author wrote it during
the course of a prolonged drinking binge. Indeed, in this
work Mr. Kin turned the run-on sentence into a high art-form.
According to this screed of unsurpassed shrillness, Wheeler
was really a flunkie of The Company all along, and a Nazi
too. The crudeness of the prose is matched by the crudeness
of the illustrations, which show Wheeler in tow with the Fuehrer
and Anaconda. "The workers and farmers and the middle class
of American must rally round Russia," Mr. Kin declaimed, and
reject "fascists" like Wheeler – and Harry Truman. The Saturday
Review of Literature called it a classic of the smear
technique, and Harper's magazine declared it the worst
book of the year.
ENDLESS ENEMIES
The Communist-dominated
labor unions had turned against him for his antiwar position
and his outspoken anti-Russian stance, and in 1946, when he
faced formidable opposition in the person of Leif Erickson,
a former justice of the state supreme court, he underestimated
the number, power, and determination of his numerous enemies.
A longtime friend of Wheeler's in the miner's union said to
him: "BK, just say something good about Russia. It will soften
the union's opposition to you." Wheeler refused. Money from
out of state poured into his opponent's coffers, and smears
in pamphlet and even book form flooded the state. In the end,
Erickson scraped by, 47,828 to 41,912. Wheeler's political
career was over. He retired to practice law in Washington,
where he died in 1975 at age 92.
TODAY'S PROGRESSIVE
IS TOMORROW'S 'REACTIONARY'
So we come
to the end of Wheeler's Progress, and find that the spirit
of the old progressive remains unaltered and undimmed. Only
now, instead of being denounced as "Bolshevik Burt," and depicted
as the harbinger of Red Revolution, he was caricatured as
quite the opposite: a reactionary opponent of Good King Franklin
and very probably a Nazi agent. And all without changing his
essential views, although his politics did evolve. Wheeler's
progress from the champion of progressivism to the greatest
enemy of the New Deal had shorn him of his leftist tinge and
his taste for economic nostrums, and left him with a healthy
skepticism of all centralized power, whether public or private,
and a positive hatred of war. Unlike the ex-Commies and liberal
Johnnie-come-lately's of the postwar era, Wheeler did not
fall for the Cold War version of interventionism. In his memoir
he writes that "the 'preventive war' urged by the 'radical
right' recommends itself to me even less than intervention
in prior wars." This ornery old progressive, who had stood
up against The Company, had shed his left-liberal skin and
made a similar stand against the Managerial State – this
time as an exemplar of the Old Right.
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